Ocean Torrents
by x-Aozora-no-Namida-x
Summary: Hitsugaya Toshirō has a certain kind of contempt for Hinamori Momo. Hitsugayacentric, implied [HitsuHina]


**Title**: Ocean Torrents  
**Rating**: K  
**Pairings/Characters**: Hitsugaya-centric, implied HitsuHina, and HitsuMatsu if you happen to have a microscope  
**Word Count**: 1365 _geez, that's more than I wrote for my last English paper Oo_  
**Warning/s**: Depressing if you can relate to it since a lot of it is written from my own experience  
**Summary**: Hitsugaya Toshirō holds a certain type of contempt for Hinamori Momo.  
**Dedication**: Anyone who reviews, and anyone who reads for that matter. I'm not really looking for reviews, but if you do review, I don't mind flames at all. In fact, I expect flames for this . . . I had so many thoughts swirling in my head when I wrote this that I think they all just crashed together and messed me up. So, flame away!  
**A/N**: This is my first fanfic. Well, the first one I uploaded. I'm a very shy person, and I never let people read what I write. However, I am probably the hardest person to offend. Seriously. I dare you to try to offend me. But remember, Santa's watching!

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Hitsugaya Toshirō is not a man of tears. 

Those who knew him as a child concur when asked, saying that the prodigy never cried when he constantly fell out of a tree he made a habit of climbing—rather, he simply learned not to and sat in the highest branch, spitting watermelon seeds at bypassers; he never whimpered when his stomach roared with hunger and his reiastu consumed him—rather, he explored a forest and forraged for food; and when the other orphans boarding at his foster home teased him about his hair, before they knew better, he didn't throw a temper tantrum—rather, he simply scowled. Before he realized it, that scowl took root onto his face, soon becoming a veneer for an acrimonious recluse.

None deny that the Tenth Captain of the Gotei 13 is like an ocean—his fluidity allows him to bend where others would break; the sheer strength he commands leaves thousands shipwrecked on his shores. Someone may ask why anyone would want to tread such an icy body of water. The answer is unanimous and clear: to find what lies on the bottom.

The greatest prophets of Soul Society could gather and speculate, but come to no conclusion; Hitsugaya Toshirō is a legend whispered cynically through Sereitei and proudly through Junrinan, and thus, not easily deciphered. Yet, if one asks the same inquiry to a child, he would reply instantaneous. Without an iota of doubt, the child would declare that, at the bottom of the Hitsugaya Toshirō, as of any ocean, there was a treasure.

Indeed, there were spoils of some sort at the bottom of the precocious boy, but none like the glitter gems others ventured for. Rather, his treasure chest teems with memories of his meager beginning: hot summer days, cool winter nights, pretentious children he vehemently built a defense to deflect, and, most significantly, Hinamori Momo.

The first day they met, he hated her. Amiable and placid, she giggled and chattered ingenously, then came up to him and gaped at his hair, insisting that it could not possibly be naturally white.

'Wow, no way!' she had exclaimed with tufts of white laced through her fingers. Then, she had suddenly decided that she had to expedite into the roots of his hair and search for an original color. His eyebrow twitched and, after growling at her to go away, she had replied, "But this is an important mission!" and resumed. His stoic façade crumbled and his indifference drained.

He had roared as he swatted her arms away from his proximity, "GET OFF OF ME! DO YOU KNOW HOW ANNOYING YOU ARE?! CAN'T YOU JUST SHUT UP?!"

Despite his austere reprimands, she came back everyday and talked to him, not always about his hair. He didn't realize how much she had grown on him until she left for the Academy.

That marked the pinnacle of his contempt; from then on, he hated that he only knew her enough to watch her walk away and feel a piece of himself missing. After that point, he gradually hated her person less and despised her absence more. Then, after one of her sojourns from the Academy, his scowl assuaged and his resolve was formed: he would go to the Academy with her—then he'd never miss her again.

So began the legacy of Hitsugaya Toshirō as he journeyed the Shinigami Academy and graduated that same year. His peers regarded him as an abberration there as well, but he expected no less—they saw him as the child prodigy, the boy who performed the most difficult tasks as if they were elementary rudiments. Their views were misconstrued, for they didn't witness the sleepless, all-night study sessions he suffered through in order to excel at the extra classes he took upon himself. No, they didn't comprehend his motivations, for in reality, he didn't study and train just to make everyone else worse in comparison; he overexerted himself so he could catch up to Hinamori, to transcend the gap between them.

When his sleepless nights rewarded him by ranking him equally as Hinamori, he decided that it wasn't enough. He had to prove himself more worthy of her affection than Aizen, as well as use himself as a scapegoat so that she would never have to suffer the things he did. And so, after suffering through the Academy, he suffered through the ranks as well, trading study sessions for extensive training sessions alone in the woods. Yet, in his rapid ascension, he didn't realize that he had created a new gap between them—he was so buried in paperwork and captain's duties that they became even more distant.

One would think such a large gap would be evident—obvious—to a child prodigy. Yet, others seems to always omit the 'child' part. As he grew up and into his rank, he realized that he was indeed an ocean—powerful, thrashing, foreboding, and cold, which made him a strong captain. But even more than that, he was a body of water, a hinderance between the starting point and the destination. He calmed the his wild torrents for her, and her alone, and allowed her the opportunity to find what lies beneath the blue-green waters. However, he could never predict what happened next: she crossed his waters, skipped over Toshirō, and went to _him_—_Aizen._ Even worse than that, she remained there and slowly moved inward until the ocean was just an entertaining memory to her.

Even now, desperately clinging to life, she refuses to let go of Aizen.

Watching her chest puff and rise from the machine breathing for her, he simply leans against the doorway. Unable to bear seeing her like this, he turns to leave.

_Because that's all I can do_—_run away, _he thinks, eyes half-lidded.

"Some words . . .?" asks a soft voice. He pauses, without turning around, at the voice of the Fourth Division Taichō, who is watching Hinamori just as he was. "Could you say some words to her? She is . . . waiting to be called for someone who needs her." Unohana-taicho's voice was sincere, but she didn't understand the situation.

"The way I am now . . ." he begins emotionlessly, "I have no words I can say to her." As a questions starts to escape the healer's lips, he quickly mutters, "If you'll excuse me," and promptly leaves for his own office.

Sitting in the darkness, he muses how lifeless it is in the administrative office without Matsumoto, conscious or not. She always seemed to distract him with her antics, whether it was from his paperwork or from his own thoughts. Realizing that he had written the same sentence _three _times, he pushes the paperwork away; tonight is _not_ a good night for paperwork.

_Hinamori . . . _he finds himself thinking vaguely. _What the hell happened?_

His head drops into his hands and his eyes fall half-lidded again. Slowly closing his eyes completely, a tear trickles from the center of his eye. Before he can stop himself, he falls into a full-blown sobbing.

"Damn you, Hinamori," he hicups to himself, though not hatefully. For, before this day, he had never cried in places where there weren't onions, and before the day he met her, he had never thrown a tantrum over anything. She brings out the worst in him, it seems.

It wasn't true, and he knows this—he feels the need to protect her, and, with that need to protect, he has flown through the ranks and became a taichō. But he was still a child, and children tend to blame the easiest target when they don't understand. Slowly, the same kind of contempt he felt for her when she left for the Academy returned. A hand slides down from his face and clutches his aching chest. Breathing shallowly, he physically feels a piece of himself missing. His breath constantly escapes him and he gasps desperately to bring it back.

Struggling to hold his breath inside of him, he realizes what is happening to him and curses Hinamori once again.

Through the years they knew each other, she had earned numerous things without even trying: his first temper tantrum, his first genuine smile, his first fluttering crush, his first eventual love, and, now, his first broken heart.

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**A/N**: Well, there it is. I hope I didn't depress you, but that is a real medical condition, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, Broken Heart syndrome in layman's terms. I had it and I thought I was dying. Oh yeah, just for future references, I don't usually use that many big words . . . I was switching between my English homework and this when I started and some of the vocabulary words leaked over I'm really bad at multi-tasking, ne?, plus I've awake since 3 o'clock. If you can, tell me how I can improve.

Thank you and Happy April Fool's Day!


End file.
